March 7, 2010

"Supreme Court should uphold local, state regulation of guns"

The title of this post is the headline of this editorial from my hometown Columbus Dispatch in this morning's paper. Because the Dispatch has a relatively conservative editorial board (it endorsed McCain and Bush in the last two presidential elections), I found both the position and the rhetoric of this editorial notable. Here are snippets:

A highly restrictive law such as Chicago's and Oak Park's would be unnecessary in many other locales, such as small towns, rural areas and anyplace where gun violence is a rare occurrence. But Oak Park sits next door to Chicago's highly urbanized suburbs and neighborhoods and absorbs their spillover criminal activity. Chicago is engaged in a major campaign to reduce the violence and, in high-crime areas, has installed sophisticated cameras that can detect gunshots, turn rapidly to capture the scene at that site and alert police.

Neither Chicago nor Oak Park bans possession of shotguns and other recreational firearms that are not handguns; these cities are not engaged in a plot to take all guns away from law-abiding citizens.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's conservative majority appears unlikely to step away from its activist interpretation of the Second Amendment as an individual right to own guns for self-defense and hunting....

The Supreme Court's 2008 decision also overturned Washington's requirement that firearms have trigger locks or be kept disassembled. This is particularly disturbing, because many cities and states have similar laws to prevent accidental firing and misuse of guns, especially by children.

Anyone who says conservative justices are not activists should look carefully at this earlier decision and consider the impending ruling in the Chicago and Oak Park cases. How do the justices of the nation's highest court presume to know what local ordinances are best for maintaining law and order on the streets of America's highly diverse cities?

Some recent related posts on McDonald Second Amendment incorporation case: